One of my favorite topics to blog about is hiring mistakes and how to avoid them. It’s true that hiring mistakes are very expensive and destructive and that we want to avoid making them at all costs. We invented SmoothHiring to help business owners avoid hiring mistakes by using science that’s built from years of hiring experience. But what if you’re entering uncharted waters, where there’s no prior knowledge to build from, like Edison inventing the light bulb, or Honda inventing a new engine. Honda?
I actually liked the video below from Honda … and I’m not typically such a fan of corporate blah blah. It’s at least trying to tackle the issue that I think affects entrepreneurship the most in my home country, Canada, where people seem to be very afraid of failure.
It’s hard to jump to new land as you’re looking down into the chasm
My friends who live in the United States don’t seem to share the same fear of failure as my fellow Canadians. Maybe it’s because Canadians worry that a few “greedy bad apples” may spoil the social and economic support structure that we worked so hard to establish (the Greatest Canadian was a guy who led the first socialist government in North America). So maybe this is why we don’t celebrate wealth the same way Americans do. Maybe this is why so many of my Canadian colleagues move to the United States to start and grow their businesses. I’m not sure.
I find it disappointing that Canadians have such a difficult time supporting the people who are taking risks, inventing new technologies, starting new companies. Don’t get me wrong – Canada is an amazing country and I choose to live here – but we need to evolve our culture in a direction that supports innovation … because – other than mining – that’s Canada’s greatest natural resource.
